There is a fundraising group called the Charity Give Back Group (CGBG), whose innocuous sounding name hides its political activities. When customers shop with major name-brand companies through their virtual shopping mall, proceeds go to CGBG affiliated groups including the Family “Research” Council, Focus On the Family, Liberty Counsel and others. LGBT activists have pressured companies to cut ties with CGBG, and so far Apple, Microsoft, Delta Airlines and Wells Fargo are among the big names that have withdrawn from the program.

Anti-gay groups are now crying foul over “homo-fascist” tactics, despite their own well-established pattern of boycotting companies who don’t fall lockstep into their program of anti-gay politics. Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber calls the pressure against companies participating in CGBG “economic terrorism” with the ultimate goal of putting conservative Christians behind bars:

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it right now. The sexual anarchist lobby, this radical, militant lobby, wants three things in this order: they want to see those of us who hold traditional values and have a biblical view of sexual behavior and sexual morality; they want to see us behind bars. Absent that, if that doesn’t work, they want to see us discredited, our licenses, my law licenses revoked, unable to teach in schools and so forth. They want us completely discredited and marginalized to the fringes of society. Finally and included in that is the inability, they want to see people like us not able to make a living. And that’s why they’re going after these organizations and they’re using economic terrorism, for lack of a better phrase.

He might want to try to come up with a better phrase. In 2008, Barber joined with Peter “Porno Pete” LaBarbera and others for a bit of “economic terrorism” of their own when they announced a boycott of McDonalds and rallied in front of their headquarters. The American Family Association regularly launches acts of “economic terrorism” against such big name companies as Home Depot and Pepsi. And by the way, their jihad against Home Depot is on again, in case you’ve had difficulty keeping track.

And speaking of wanting to put people behind bars, AFA’s spokesman Bryan Fischer yesterday pined for the days when homosexuality was a felony in all fifty states and says, “There is no reason why it cannot be a criminal offense once again. Absolutely none.”

Admittedly, the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer could qualify for this award virtually every day, so we’ve had to raise the bar for his nomination for this award. (He’s won threetimesbefore.) Yesterday, Right Wing Watch caught Fischer saying this:

You’re going to have the homosexual lobby committing one hate crime after another against service members, especially officers, who have deeply held convictions about the acceptability of homosexual behavior. And so I’m predicting that things are about to get very ugly in the United States military for people of faith. We are going to see principle-driven officers, one after another, are going to become to victims of systematic hate crimes. This is going to be a pogrom, this is going to be virtual genocide, military genocide, career genocide for people of faith in military, perpetrated by the homosexual lobby.

Brian Brown from National Organization for Marriage lost his already limited capacity for original thought and channels John Paul Jones:

We have not yet begun to fight for marriage,” said Brian Brown, president of NOM.”The Democrats are responding to their election loss with a series of extraordinary, extra-constitutional end runs around democracy, whether it’s fleeing the state in Wisconsin and Indiana to prevent a vote, or unilaterally declaring homosexuals a protected class under our Constitution, as President Obama just did,” said Brown. “We call on the House to intervene to protect DOMA, and to tell the Obama administration they have to respect the limits on their power. This fight is not over, it has only begun!”

On the one hand this is a truly shocking extra-constitutional power grab in declaring gay people are a protected class, and it’s also a defection of duty on the part of the President Obama,” said Maggie Gallagher, Chairman of NOM, “On the other hand, the Obama administration was throwing this case in court anyway. The good news is this now clears the way for the House to intervene and to get lawyers in the court room who actually want to defend the law, and not please their powerful political special interests.”

Regardless of President Obama’s own ideological agenda, as President, he and his Attorney General have a duty to defend lawfully passed legislation, especially when the essence of the law has been upheld by many courts. Thirty states have passed marriage amendments affirming marriage as one man and one woman. Today President Obama has abandoned his role as President of the United States and transformed his office into the President of the Divided States. He has been the most divisive president in American history. He has today declared war on the American people and the fundamental values that are shared by most Americans. His radicalism resulted in the historical push-back in the 2010 elections. His radicalism today will come back around when the people respond to this betrayal in 2012,” said Staver.

Focus On the Family’s Tom Minnery wants Congressional Republicans to drop whatever they’re doing and pick up the flag:

“We would hope Congress uses the tools at its disposal to counter this decision and defend marriage,” Minnery said.

“With this decision the President has thrown down the gauntlet, challenging Congress. It is incumbent upon the Republican leadership to respond by intervening to defend DOMA, or they will become complicit in the President’s neglect of duty,” concluded Perkins.

“I think it’s a clear sign that we simply cannot avoid engaging on the social issues,” Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis for the group, told TPM. “Mitch Daniels has called for a truce on social issues and that would be fine if the homosexual lobby was willing to lay down arms, but they’re obviously not and this proves it. A truce is nothing more than a surrender.”

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, criticized the administration change of position. “While Americans want Washington to focus on creating jobs and cutting spending, the president will have to explain why he thinks now is the appropriate time to stir up a controversial issue that sharply divides the nation,” said spokesman Brendan Buck.

Nonetheless, Huckabee opposes gay marriage on the grounds that, according to him, it destroys traditional families. “There is a quantified impact of broken families,” Huckabee said. “[There is a] $300 billion dad deficit in America every year…that’s the amount of money that we spend as taxpayers to pick up the pieces because dads are derelict in their duties.”

Last month, Minnesota governor and prospective GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty made waves when he went on a radio program hosted by American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer — yes, thatBryanFischer — to say that if he were elected president, Pawlenty would reinstate “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Today, Pawlenty is doubling down on that statement:

Appearing at the Family Leader’s Presidential Lecture Series in Iowa, which ThinkProgress attended, Pawlenty reiterated his argument for why the policy should not have been repealed and then, when pushed, agreed with ThinkProgress that taking away the funding “would be a reasonable step”:

When it comes to anti-gay activists, there are few people nastier than the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer. Yes, there are plenty who share his aversion to any policy, practice, or social attitude which does not presume that gay people are vile creatures deserving of derision and harsh abuse, but Fischer is among the few who boldly use language that others reserve for the private company of those who share their animus.

And it is primarily due to Fischer and his nasty rants that the AFA has earned the rare distinction of being added to the short list or organizations recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an Anti-Gay Hate Group.

But on occasion, even certified haters say something that rings true. And while Fischer makes his point using contemptuous stereotypes and sneering smugness, I think he makes a good point:

If a homosexual signs up now, he’s stuck with the whole magilla. Go to your superior officer now and say, hey, I’m a flaming homosexual, I hate the army, let me out of here, the superior officer will say, tough darts, those days are gone. You’re stuck with us now, Nancy-boy.
…
The more this message resounds, the fewer homosexuals will want to enlist. It’s one thing to be gay, and say, hey, I’ll give it a few weeks and then bail if I don’t like the food, can’t get enough action in the barracks, or thought I’d enjoy ogling male soldiers in the shower more than I did.

Those days are now shortly to be a distant memory for our homosexual friends. They enlist, they’re stuck with the whole program just like everybody else.

In other words, they had preferential treatment and special privileges, a status and privileges and an exit strategy denied to their honest and straight counterparts. And homosexuals just bargained it away. Now, they will discover to their dismay, they’re back to having equal rights instead of special rights.

Besides the palpable hatred, Fischer also plays a lot with insinuation, equating “basis of statements by the Service member” – which could simply mean that the servicemember wasn’t caught in the act, so to speak – with “throwing themselves out”. Further, he entirely dismisses the idea that servicepeople may wish to be honest, a principle about which he knows nothing.

But he’s right. One of the things that bothered me about the administration of DADT was that it truly did give unhappy gay and lesbians soldiers an advantage. Once a DADT expulsion became an Honorable Discharge, then the policy harmed committed soldiers wishing to continue their noble service and rewarded those who just wanted out.

Now I doubt that many soldiers considered a policy that demeaned their existence and forced silence and dishonesty on them to be “preferential treatment.” And from what I’ve read, many revealed their orientation only after enduring unbearable treatment by homophobes, from which they had no recourse.

But to the extent that there were gay people who saw their orientation as an escape clause from a poorly chosen contract, that “special right” is gone. Once DADT is fully dead, everyone will be treated the same.

Disenfranchising LGBT Americans from the institution of marriage isn’t enough for the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer. He also thinks LGBT Americans should be legally banned from public office:

He is Exhibit A as to why homosexuals should be disqualified from public office. Character is an important qualification for public service, and what an individual does in his private sexual life is a critical component of character. A man who ignores time-honored standards of sexual behavior simply cannot be trusted with the power of public office.

He also thinks that this should have disqualified Elana Kagan from the Supreme Court:

This, by the way, is why Elana Kagan should not be elevated to the Supreme Court. Although she has not come out of the closet herself, her lesbian partner has, and Ms. Kagan’s sexual preference is an open secret in Washington circles. Her indulgence in sexually aberrant behavior should make her ineligible to serve on the highest court in the land.

Kagan’s lesbian partner? Where did this rumor come from?

Bryan Fischer is a repeathonoree. The Prop 8 decision has spawned twoother award winners in the past twenty four hours so far. Prop 8 is really bringing out the crazy, isn’t it?

The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer has some reservations about the fact that some Evangelical conservatives support President Barack Obama’s immigration reform proposals. Those evangelical see Latinos, who make up the bulk of the expected beneficiaries of immigration reform, as being sufficiently anti-gay and, therefore, desirable future voters for socially conservative causes. Fischer disagrees:

Not so fast. According to the Christian Post, 57% of Latino Catholics in California support homosexual marriage. Let’s not forget that Latinos make up 36.6 percent of California’s population.

The good news, if you happen to be an evangelical, is that just 22 percent of Latino Protestants support gay marriage.

If getting pro-family illegals legalized is the goal, perhaps Dr. Land can be persuaded to amend his recommendation and give preference to Protestant illegal aliens.

Leave it to Fischer to suggest a religious test for entry to the U.S. The American Family Association, according to former AFA attorney Joe Murray, isn’t just anti-gay, but anti-Catholic as well. This, of course, shouldn’t be too surprising. Where there’s one form of bigotry, there’s almost never a good reason to refrain from indulging in other forms as well.

Godwin’s rule says “”As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Well, it appears that Godwin’s Law applies to political rhetoric offline as well.

Take for example this very creative take on history from Glen Urquhart, a Republican congressional candidate in Delaware. Mr. Urquhart appears to be explaining why it is that he supports a theocracy.

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

Some of England’s leading newspapers – The Sun, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail – all had feature stories yesterday about the latest Taliban terror tactic: burying dirty needles with their bombs in an effort to infect troops with HIV. They are planting hypodermic syringes below the surface with the points facing upward in hopes that bomb squad experts will prick themselves and become contaminated with hepatitis and HIV.

If the bomb goes off, then the needles become deadly flying shrapnel.

Said a member of Parliament, “Are there no depths to which these people will stoop? This is the definition of a dirty war.”

If we connect the dots here, the inescapable conclusion is that gay sex is a form of domestic terrorism.

…Now if gays are allowed into the military, they will be inevitably be put in battlefield situations where donated blood from soldiers may be necessary to save the lives of wounded comrades. An HIV-infected American soldier whose blood is used in those circumstances may very well condemn his fellow soldier to death rather than save his life.

If open homosexuals are allowed into the United States military, the Taliban won’t need to plant dirty needles to infect our soldiers with HIV. Our own soldiers will take care of that for them.

All members of the military, gay or straight, are tested for HIV before they enter. Once in the army, everyone, again gay or straight, is tested every two years. Only those who are HIV-negative are sent into war zones. Other services have similar policies. A simple Google search can uncover this information in just 0.32 seconds. Fischer’s vision of hoards of AIDS-infected soldiers posing as a terrorist threat is purely a figment of his imagination. And it’s that creative spark that we look for whenever we award someone the LaBarbera Award.

The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer has a blog commentary today about the problems with that Lawrence v. Texas. Homosexuality should be illegal; it would make life easier. If gay folk were all just declared felons, then all of those pesky issues with civil rights and freedoms would just go away.

Think for a moment of the current social controversies that could potentially be avoided if homosexual conduct was still against the law.

Gays in the military: problem solved. We shouldn’t make a place for habitual felons in the armed forces. End of discussion, end of controversy. If someone objects, ask them which other felonies the military ought to overlook in screening recruits.

Gay marriage: problem solved. We should never legalize unions between any two people when the union is forged specifically to engage in felony behavior. Would we sanction, for instance, the formation of a corporation whose stated purpose was to import illegal drugs?

Gay indoctrination in the schools: problem solved. We don’t want to raise a generation of schoolchildren to believe that felony behavior is perfectly appropriate. That’s why we spend so much money warning students about the danger of drugs.

Hate crimes laws: problem solved. We wouldn’t throw a pastor in jail for saying that illegal behavior is not only illegal but also immoral. For instance, he’s free to say that murder is not only contrary to man’s law but also to God’s law. End of the threat to freedom of religion and speech.

Special rights for homosexuals in the workplace: problem solved. No employer should be forced to hire admitted felons to work for him. End of the threat to freedom of religion and freedom of association in the marketplace.

But why stop with the homosexual felons? Why not apply this solution to other social undesirables.

Two months ago, Fischer identified another group that were getting all uppity and trying to be treated just like real people.

It is time, I suggest, to stop the practice of allowing Muslims to serve in the U.S. military. The reason is simple: the more devout a Muslim is, the more of a threat he is to national security. Devout Muslims, who accept the teachings of the Prophet as divinely inspired, believe it is their duty to kill infidels.

Well, that issue has a little problem with the First Amendment. The whole establishment of religion thingy says that the military can’t determine who gets to serve based on religion.

But we can get around that; just declare all Muslims to be felons. Problem solved. We shouldn’t make a place for habitual felons in the armed forces. End of discussion, end of controversy.

Put simply, there is no evidence to suggest that blacks aren’t committing the majority of homicides in general and first degree murders in particular. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that proponents of affirmative action will demand that we begin to execute more blacks to make up for their present under-representation in American death chambers. And we can safely say they are under-represented by ignoring their representation in the general population (an irrelevant 12%) and looking at their representation among the population of killers (a relevant 55%).

Solution: declare all African Americans to be felons. Not only would that return black men to their proper place in the social order (and proper treatment by the judicial system), but it would solve indoctrination in schools, hate crimes, and special rights in the workplace all in one fell swoop.

But, you know, why hold back. We should just make socialists, atheists, feminists, and the poor all to be felons. If we define it broadly enough, we could make American a wonderful place again for straight, white, Southern Baptist land-owning men, like our founding fathers intended.

Now I know that we might have a small problem for a while with our crime rates. I mean there would be an awful lot of felons in the country at first. But we could just rightly apply the death penalty for dangerous felons; and then we wouldn’t have ACLU types going on and on about jail overcrowding.

And if someone objects, ask them which other felonies the country ought to overlook.

It it is time, I suggest, to stop the practice of allowing Muslims to serve in the U.S. military. The reason is simple: the more devout a Muslim is, the more of a threat he is to national security. Devout Muslims, who accept the teachings of the Prophet as divinely inspired, believe it is their duty to kill infidels. Yesterday’s massacre is living proof. And yesterday’s incident is not the first fragging incident involving a Muslim taking out his fellow U.S. soldiers.

Of course, most U.S. Muslims don’t shoot up their fellow soldiers. Fine. As soon as Muslims give us a foolproof way to identify their jihadis from their moderates, we’ll go back to allowing them to serve. You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you’re right, and Muslims can once again serve. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk. You invent a jihadi-detector that works every time it’s used, and we’ll welcome you back with open arms.

Let’s contrast Fischer’s statement to the 1942 US Government propaganda film “Japanese Relocation” (wikipedia / youtube):

We knew that some among them [Japanese Americans] were potentially dangerous but no one knew what would happen among this concentrated population if Japanese forces should try and invade our shores. Military authorities therefore determined that all of them, citizens and aliens alike would have to move.

Near the end of the film:

[This current story of Japanese internment] will be fully told only when circumstances permit the loyal American citizens once again to enjoy the freedom we in this country cherish and when the disloyal, we hope, have left this country for good. In the mean time we are setting a standard for the rest of the world in the treatment for people who may have loyalties to an enemy nation, we are protecting ourselves without violating the principals of Christian decency. We won’t change this fundamental decency no matter what our enemies do.

In this original BTB Investigation, we unveil the tragic story of Kirk Murphy, a four-year-old boy who was treated for “cross-gender disturbance” in 1970 by a young grad student by the name of George Rekers. This story is a stark reminder that there are severe and damaging consequences when therapists try to ensure that boys will be boys.

When we first reported on three American anti-gay activists traveling to Kampala for a three-day conference, we had no idea that it would be the first report of a long string of events leading to a proposal to institute the death penalty for LGBT people. But that is exactly what happened. In this report, we review our collection of more than 500 posts to tell the story of one nation’s embrace of hatred toward gay people. This report will be updated continuously as events continue to unfold. Check here for the latest updates.

In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany.” What the SPLC didn”t know was Cameron doesn’t just “echo” Nazi Germany. He quoted extensively from one of the Final Solution’s architects. This puts his fascination with quarantines, mandatory tattoos, and extermination being a “plausible idea” in a whole new and deeply disturbing light.

From the Inside: Focus on the Family’s “Love Won Out”

On February 10, I attended an all-day “Love Won Out” ex-gay conference in Phoenix, put on by Focus on the Family and Exodus International. In this series of reports, I talk about what I learned there: the people who go to these conferences, the things that they hear, and what this all means for them, their families and for the rest of us.

Using the same research methods employed by most anti-gay political pressure groups, we examine the statistics and the case studies that dispel many of the myths about heterosexuality. Download your copy today!

Anti-gay activists often charge that gay men and women pose a threat to children. In this report, we explore the supposed connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, the conclusions reached by the most knowledgeable professionals in the field, and how anti-gay activists continue to ignore their findings. This has tremendous consequences, not just for gay men and women, but more importantly for the safety of all our children.

Anti-gay activists often cite the “Dutch Study” to claim that gay unions last only about 1½ years and that the these men have an average of eight additional partners per year outside of their steady relationship. In this report, we will take you step by step into the study to see whether the claims are true.

Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council submitted an Amicus Brief to the Maryland Court of Appeals as that court prepared to consider the issue of gay marriage. We examine just one small section of that brief to reveal the junk science and fraudulent claims of the Family “Research” Council.

The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.